Fleshly Japonisme: The Taste for Japan and Women’s Bodies in France 1870–1914
Japonisme, or the taste for Japan, was a pivotal cultural phenomenon in nineteenth-century Europe and North America, giving rise to modernism and providing opportunities to unlearn norms of one’s home culture in an act of self-invention. One of japonisme’s most outstanding iterations, however, has eluded critical scrutiny: middle-class women’s bodily experiences of Japanese and Japan-inspired goods. My dissertation addresses this gendered oversight by examining sensorial aspects of japonisme that catered to French bourgeois women. Ideas of Japan reached these women as something capable of physically and psychologically affecting their bodies, as they handled and purchased Japanese images and objects, donned kimonos, and applied cosmetics scented with “Japanese” fragrances. Through a series of case studies, I explore ways that japonisme allowed women to reimagine themselves beyond Western gender norms. This project investigates cross-cultural consumption as a form of intimate empowerment, focusing on the marginalized bodily sensations and pleasures of middle-class women as a group. In so doing, it revises the historical scholarship’s gendered emphasis on the cerebral accomplishments of identifiable, often male, individuals. On a broader level, the project calls attention to the power of speculation as a critical methodology of historical research on subjects that have circumvented documentation, such as evanescent sensations, illicit fantasies, and momentary pleasures.
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